Thursday, 6 July 2000

I'll spare you an extensive travelogue, but I will tell you that I'm in the Baltimore/Washington area this week for a family wedding and I spent the Fourth of July at the Washington Monument with my niece Alisa, enjoying one of the best evenings of fireworks ever. I grew up in Baltimore and I think we came out for the D.C. display one year, but not nearly this close to the fire. From our spot right next to the monument, we could feel every explosion and hear each blast, not from the echo, but on the front line. Fortunately, Alisa knew enough to place us just out of the way of the wave of smoke and soot that flowed like air-light lava just a hundred or so yards away. Very cool. Very cinematic. In fact, some of the styles of fireworks that I've never seen before seemed to have a digital film feel and felt as though they were designed to give the viewer a clearly 3-D feel. Great evening.

THE GOOD: New Line's Mike DeLuca is on the eternal look-out for young filmmakers who do small, beautiful magic tricks. Paul Thomas Anderson came to New Line after he had Hard Eight/Sydney taken away from him. David Fincher came to New Line after majors shied away from him after his Walter Hill/Larry Ferguson generated disaster on Alien 3. For all of his rage, Tony Kaye got free reign at New Line until he stopped delivering on any identifiable level of sanity. So earlier this year, when I wondered in print why guys like John Cusack and his buddies Pink & DeVincentis were at Disney instead of New Line, I already knew that he'd want them as much as I wanted him to have them. These are, indeed, the intimate superstars of the industry that he craves. And so, when I saw that DeLuca & Co. saved the latest project from Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Oscar® nominees for Election earlier this year, from development hell after the project fell apart at Columbia, I smiled to myself. The project, About Schmidt, which they wrote with Jack Nicholson in mind, is about a 60something man whose life has passed him by and who now needs to find some value to his life. One thing I'm pretty sure about…he won't find it in Helen Hunt or Greg Kinnear. And hallelujah…this is a Hollywood marriage that may actually fit like a glove.

THE BAD: News Corp., parent company of 20th Century Fox, will take a $120 million write-down in the next quarter, clearing out the bad cash flow and the costs of Titan A.E. in particular. But here is the irony. In an industry where a lot of people presume that the decisions made in the offices of the productions of presidents are heavily influenced by the stock price fluctuations of the mega-corps that parent all the major studios these days except for DreamWorks, this write-down won't likely cause News Corp. much more than a little blip on their big radar. Of course, this is still what is being held out as the cause for Bill Mechanic's exit. But the fact that folks like Merrill Lynch's Jessica Reif Cohen just say, "so what?," suggests that the alternate explanations for Mechanic's exit still ring true…his movie choices pissed Rupert off and Titan was a good excuse to pull the plug. I expect Fox's history with its former studio chiefs to continue with Mechanic, who followed Joe Roth and Barry Diller, among others, into the post-Fox sunset. They should all live and be well.

THE UGLY: California Governor Gray Davis took a fly swatter to an elephant this week, signing in a 3-year, $45 million subsidy to support location film production in the state of California in an effort to stem the tide of runaway production. That's $15 million a year to pay for government fees and state employee costs (like police) that are now paid for by productions. Wow! That's gonna really make a big difference! A production saves $5000 on a production by staying here. Another saves $100,000 by going to Calgary. Hmmmm…what to do? The truth is, I have no answers here. Realistically, film production is a small business category in California and the real costs of stopping runaway production, that would be a tax break that saved filmmakers staying in California at least 50 percent of what they now save going to Canada, may not be worth the cost to the state. The only real alternative is a law creating what would likely be an unconstitutional levy against films produced in Canada. That's the raw dollars and cents. Sorry. $15 million? Watch it get lapped up almost exclusively by people who were never leaving in the first place.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: DreamWorks, which successfully launched American Beauty last year in Toronto, will launch their new Cameron Crowe film (word has it that the money is back on the title "The Uncool") and their want-to-be-an-Oscar-contender The Contender from writer/director Rod "The Bod" Lurie at the festival this September. I kid "The Bod," but there seems little question that DreamWorks isn't messing around in pushing this $12 million film all the way to a bare minimum of two acting nominations and what is beginning to look like a clean shot at Best Actress for Joan Allen. And while reports from test screenings of Crowe's latest seem to be loaded with hills and valleys, I could not care much less. Art is not about testing. And Cameron Crowe is an artist. As my friend Ed once said in reference to younger days, "Let the players play and they can play for days." See you in the Great Cement North.

BAD AD WATCH: A case of EQW (Extreme Quote Whoring) came up this weekend, with Stephen Farber's spectacular quote for Scary Movie: "Exhilarating! Follows in the tradition of There's Something About Mary and Animal House, but is raunchier than any of them. This ribald satire cheerfully defies all respectable standards, offering clever jokes at the expense of many films from Usual Suspects to Scream, The Matrix and Blair Witch." Well! That was hotter for a publicist than a found Playboy to a 13-year-old boy. Is there a single wished-for comparative film that Farber missed? Nonetheless, that's not my biggest complaint. My surprise at seeing any quote on a Scary Movie ad was created by Miramax's extreme care in tightly holding the embargo on ALL reviews of the movie. So much so that at least one group of on line writers got the following note when invited to a Scary screening: "This is a reminder that online reviews of Scary Movie must not appear before July 7, 2000. The studio has made it very clear that any site that posts a review earlier than July 7, 2000 shall be removed from the screening list and not be able to attend future press or advance screenings." Miramax has done, according to tracking (do we believe anything about tracking after this last weekend?), a brilliant job of marketing this movie, surviving an extremely negative response to the trailer at ShoWest and aggressively eschewing any help from critics. Nonetheless, there is something scary going on here.

READER OF THE DAY: The Lonesome Dove gives me a ranting run for my money: "How on earth could you like The Perfect Storm? By the end of that movie I felt battered and bruised from the special effects. I was also emotionally numb by the end. I did not feel emotionally invested in the characters and their stories. I believe the director assaulted the audience with so much eye and sound candy that it was difficult to feel anything for the characters by the time the climax rolled around. I simply wanted it to end. I really wanted to like this movie. The effects were completely awe inspiring, but I gave up toward the end. I just needed some breathing time. I think a big reason for Titanic's success is that Cameron left the eye candy toward the end and he incorporated it into the story quite nicely. He also had a good story. Storm made me feel that this was first an effects movie and then a drama. I saw a documentary about this true story a while ago and that was completely riveting. We didn't have the fancy effects or loud sound. The filmmakers simply told what happened and gave us a little background information on the lost fishermen. That's it. I honestly think that it's a good idea to tell a story as simply as possible. You can always build upon the story during development.

I also saw The Patriot and Chicken Run. Chicken Run was by far the best movie I saw this weekend. The Patriot was a melodramatic film that was unnecessarily violent. People were dying left and right but I was still involved in the story. I was with the film until (edited out spolier) were murdered by the British. Okay, so the director basically took me to a wonderful high with the wedding and destroys that high minutes later. Why? Why would you do that to your audience? You can't mistreat your audience like that and expect them to stay with you. I simply gave up at that moment. That frustrated me so much that I started criticizing the rest of the film. I began to notice how shamelessly melodramatic this film really is. Is there really a need for slow motion shots of Mel Gibson running with an American flag? Did we really need to see low angle close ups of Gibson's visage throughout the movie? There were some young college guys right next to us and they were laughing at the melodramatic moments throughout the entire movie. I ignored them for most of the movie and allowed myself to get involved with this sweeping drama. When the townspeople were burned in that church, I simply gave up.

I also didn't like the fact that the British were portrayed as evil, arrogant, cardboard stereotypes. It reminded me of the way white people were treated in the movie Rosewood a few years back. In spite of the times or the situations, not all white people are evil, one-dimensional monsters. Maybe the director portrayed the British as such so that we would accept Mel Gibson's cold-blooded slaughter of them. I don't know.

Chicken Run, on the other hand, was smart, funny and had a lot of heart. Even the one violent scene in the movie was done with taste. I believe Toy Story 1& 2 were both better, but this story was very well done. I think it's a good lesson for studios to learn that you don't need special effects and gory violence to tell a good story."

E ME: How was your Fourth of July? In brief, please tell me how many movies you saw over the five day weekend? I'll publish the results on Monday.